Page 45 of Sweethearts and Savages
His face screwed up in confusion. “You’re what, twenty? I’m like five years older than you.”
She smiled at him then, her fangs flashing in the fluorescent lights. Finally, the color drained from Cedric Frostmore’s face and his fear turned to absolute terror.
I huffed. “I threaten to remove his liver, and get nothing. You flash some fang and he looks like he’s going to piss himself. Vampires have such an unfair advantage.”
Raine sashayed over, patting my cheek. “It’s cute you thought you even stood a chance in the competition.” She turned hard eyes on Cedric. “Are you going to tell me what I want to know? Because the guy who just left? He’s a fucking dragon, and he makes even vampires scared. You stole his granddaughter. He’s not happy.”
Cedric was shaking his head, and as if Alexander had been listening at the door, he strode back in, holding a bone saw and a fucking dinner plate.
Honestly. It was terrifying.
“I don’t have her!” Cedric yelled, finally struggling against his bonds. “I was just researching. I didn’t even think you guys were real. I promise, I don’t know where she is.”
Alexander rolled his eyes. “Well, we have nothing but time, and you have a lot of body parts.”
“Seriously, it wasn’t my vendetta.”
I tilted my head. “Whose vendetta was it, then?”
Cedric swallowed hard. “I won’t tell you. But he won’t hurt a girl. His dad used to beat his mom, so he won’t hurt a girl. He wanted…” He trailed off like he knew he was about to dig himself deeper.
Raine put a hand on his arm. “Trust me when I say it’s best to get this all out before her fathers come home. Because the last person who hurt our family? Got his heart ripped out and eaten. The one before that, chopped into a thousand pieces. Trust me, you don’t want that fate. Pretty sure the guy didn’t die until the ninety-seventh slice.”
How Cedric didn’t wet himself was almost courageous. I’d heard about Lucius the vampire. He was a boogeyman under your bed. For years, he’d been an unchecked sociopathic hedonist. He’d eaten whole villages, drained whole Packs. Raine had steadied him, apparently, and from what I’d seen of him, he seemed… okay. Not homicidal, but he danced on that knife’s edge like he enjoyed the pain of being cut.
Cedric shuddered. “Look, I won’t give you his name. I know he’s as good as dead if you find him.”
No one refuted his words. We wouldn’t lie to the human about it.
“I don’t even really know why. All I know is that Eden did something to his family, and he promised his dad on his deathbed that he’d avenge him.”
“The same father who beat his mother?” Raine asked, and Cedric shrugged.
“Guess so? Anyway, he put out feelers and at first, I thought he was insane. But he was hot, and a certain level of insanity is okay if they have a sharp jaw, you know?” Raine made an understanding humming noise. I guess she really would know. “So I looked into it for him; I thought nothing would come from it. But the deeper I dug, the more questions I had, until I stumbled across you guys up here in the wilds of fucking Canada. And then to be bounced off a military grade firewall? May as well have held up a giant flashing sign that says ‘Nothing to see here’, because I’m going to try and find a peep-hole in that wall, you know?”
I rumbled low in my chest. Enough with the fucking conversation. “Where is she, Cedric?”
He looked back at me, and I knew the lion was really close to the surface.
“I don’t know.”
“YOU FUCKING LIE!” I roared.
He blanched even more, and I was a little worried he was about to pass out. “I mean it. Somewhere up north. He’s gone dark for twelve days. But you have to promise not to kill him. Or me. He’s just screwed up, his dad was a violent fuck, and he twisted him up inside. He’s a good guy. Promise you won’t kill him. Or me,” he added again.
No one made him that promise, because it depended on Enit. If this guy had so much as bruised her pale skin, I would tear the fucker limb from limb. The lion snarled in my mind and I knew I wouldn’t be able to help myself, no matter what promises I made right now.
“Where?” I said in a low, quiet voice.
“Outside Yellowknife. In the Northwest Territories.”
That was all I needed to know. I punched Cedric once in the face, knocking him clean out—he deserved it. His actions had resulted inmygirl being kidnapped. Scared and alone somewhere up north, with a fucking psycho as a kidnapper. If I thought about what he could be doing to her… I swallowed hard.
She would be okay. She would.
But that other fucker? I was coming for him and his days were numbered.
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